MacMost Now 647: Editing Video With QuickTime Player

You can use the QuickTime Player in Lion to make quick changes to your videos rather than starting an iMovie project. You can merge videos, trim them, split and re-arrange sections of a video and export in standard QuickTime format. You can also rotate video that has been shot in the wrong orientation.

Hi, this is Gary with 'MacMost Now.' On today's episode let's use Quick Time Player to edit video.
Now lost among all the other new features in Lion are the new functions added to Quick Time Player. Now you can use Quick Time Player as a very basic video editor. A little bit closer to how Quick Time Pro was for previous versions of Quick Time.
So let's start out with a very simple example. I've got three videos here and let's say I just want to merge them all into one, long video, and then I can say upload that to a website or do whatever I'm going to do with it.
So I'm going to double click on the first one here to open it up in Quick Time Player. And you can see it's there just as normal.
Now I can go to go to Edit and Add Clip to End and then select one of these other videos and you can see I've got this basic editor down here below where I've got two videos now in place.
As a matter of fact I can even drag one and change the order like that.
And I can also now go to Insert Clip After Selection again and I'm going to put it to the end. I could also insert it right here in the middle, let's do that. And select the last one. And now you can see I've got all three here.
I could play the video to see it or I can hit Done to make the changes permanent.
Now if I want to now save this new video I can do Export, and export it in any of the formats here. In this case it's a 480p video so it's not going to give me HD options but I could save it as an MOV or as an M4V and save it out to the Desktop and then it will save the entire thing as one video.
I can also use the Share menu and share it out to one of these services right from the Quick Time Player.
Now let's go back to the start here and open up that first video again. I can also do functions just on this video. So I can go to Edit, Trim and it brings up the editor but I've got start and stop points. And I can trim the video now down to a certain amount.
So if I want to cut out some of the beginning or the end I can do that. I can scrub along here and see exactly where it is I want to set the trim and then when I'm done I hit Trim and it will cut out everything.
Now another thing you can do you can split a clip at a location. So you get to a location of the video and you can go to Edit, Split Clip or Command Y and it will actually break the clip into two pieces. And then this allows you to then insert something after one so you can Insert another clip in there like this.
You can also of course select and delete it. You can rearrange them, do all sorts of things.
I should also mention there's some special functions in here like rotation. So if you have video that was taken by say by holding your camera on the side and you want to rotate it you can do the entire rotation like that.
And then if you end up with video of different orientation you can do Clip Alignment. So if you've got one video that's horizontal, one's vertical, and so you need to kind of align them to the center or the top, you can do that using this menu here.
Now after you've already edited a video you get back to the little editor interface, you would go to View, Show Clips. And this allows you to continue editing it. For instance I can select one of the clips here, position the playback head by dragging it and do Command Y to split it.
Do the same thing here. You have to both select it and move the playback head and then you can split and then you could rearrange these clips like that.
So there's a basic look at editing in Quick Time Player. You can add new clips to a video, you can split clips and you can rearrange them and you can trim clips. And then you can also do other functions like rotation.
So it's good for really quick things when you want to put stuff together. You don't have all the fancy features like transitions and being able to add special effects and things like that like you can in iMovie or Final Cut.
But it's great if you need to get in there quick and don't feel like creating an entire iMovie Project just to merge some videos.
Hope you found this useful. Till next time, this is Gary with, 'MacMost Now.'

I have downloaded a video which I can play in Quicktime Player. If I trim the video, I can export the changed video. If I split into clips and then try to export it, I receive a warning “Operation Stopped”. No matter what I do, cannot save the file if I split into clips. Any ideas?